How to Decide Between Leads and Accounts & Contacts in CRM

A quintessential debate that has existed since the dawn of CRM platforms is whether you should use Leads or Accounts & Contacts as a place to organize your prospecting activities. Let's take a look at considerations for how to decide which approach to use.

One of the reasons this is complicated is that Leads will convert into Accounts & Contacts as the sales cycle deepens, and an Opportunity is created in the pipeline.

At its core, your decision depends on factors like:

• Volume of prospects

• Length and depth of sales cycle

• Marketing and sales qualification processes

Note on that last point: marketing and sales qualification processes are separate, don't conflate them.

Volume of prospects
Higher volumes tend to favor using Leads as a place to collect prospects that require qualification for both B2B and B2C organizations. This is especially true if marketing is running paid campaigns to generate conversions (in the sense that a prospect submits a web form), as those will require further qualification.

Length and depth of sales cycle
Longer and deeper sales cycles, especially those with multiple personas involved in the buying process, are better organized as Accounts & Contacts. Even if a prospective customer has not been qualified, the research and outreach required tends to require having a single place to see key details about the customer and its people.

Marketing and sales qualification processes
Starting with marketing, the qualification processes depend on how they're supporting demand generation. If the intent is to build awareness and interest in your offerings, marketing may be creating or acquiring a lot of prospects that require nurturing journeys.

Those journeys are used to qualify prospects based on engagement and actions (e.g. submitting a form for a white paper, joining a webinar). Leads tends to be an appropriate place for marketing to qualify a prospect, then pass it to sales for further qualification.

In that case, sales will run its qualification process within Leads to determine if conversion into Accounts & Contacts with an Opportunity is worthwhile based on factors like budget, authority, need, and timing (BANT).

With account based marketing (ABM), your marketing and sales team have essentially pre-qualified a bunch of prospective customers based on criteria aligning with your ideal customer profile (ICP). Using Accounts & Contacts to organize these prospects is appropriate given the level of research, completeness, and stratification for buyer personas.

In that case, marketing and sales are working closely to prioritize which prospects to engage for further discovery, which ultimately is a sales qualification process. Given this strategy often is used with a more in-depth sales qualification framework like MEDDIC (or one of its several variations by adding more letters).

TLDR: It depends on your volume, length and depth of sales cycle, and how marketing and sales execute qualification processes.

Still unsure?

If you're still unsure after reading this, subscribe to the newsletter below, then reply to the welcome email and tell me about your situation. Often, it's just a matter of adjusting one of the factors to make the decision clear.